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Overview

Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next.

Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women  sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts  and the men who loved them, often abused them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse.

As always, Dorothy Allison is provocative, confrontational, and brutally honest. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, steeped in the hard-won wisdom of experience, expresses the strength of her unique vision with beauty and eloquence.

Product Details

About the Author

Dorothy Allison is the acclaimed author of the nationally bestselling novel Bastard Out of Carolina, which was a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The recipient of numerous awards, she lives in Northern California.

Editorial Reviews

Allison's much-praised novel Bastard Out of Carolina was inspired by her childhood in Greenville, S.C., but in this memoir, adapted from a performance piece, she cuts even closer to the bone. "We don't have a family Bible?'' the author's fourth-grade self asks her aunt. "Child, some days we don't even have a family,'' comes the response. If Allison suffered horrors, notably rape by her stepfather when she was five, she has transmuted pain into stories, gaining control with maturity. Indeed, her title prefaces several hard-won aphorisms she uses to counterpoint her memories: "No one is as hard as my uncles had to pretend to be.'' Her mother was a beauty, as was her sister, but Dorothy, smart and plain, felt a legacy of ugliness, one she shook off slowly as her feminism and her heart led her to lesbian relationships, often painful, finally rewarding. She is now, in her 40s, a new mother, and her stories -- and life -- are a triumph of love over cruelty. Read it aloud and savor the rhythms.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina) is a poet, essayist, and novelist, but in all these she is a storyteller. For her, stories are not simply creations but the very things that create us. Resounding with a familiarity of the intimate turned universal, this brief memoir recounts the episodes and people of Allison's life who created her and her own re-creation of herself. Often painful and mean, the stories are never bitter or despairing because of Allison's ability to move beyond, if not transform, the meaningless cruelty of life. Written as a performance piece, the cadence of the prose reverberates in the head and begs to be read out loud: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me." With this retelling, Allison remakes that coat in her own image and leaves readers waiting for more stories. Highly recommended. -Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

Any time she says, 'Let me tell you a story,' all she has to do is name the time and the place. I'll be there.  Boston Sunday Globe

Geoffrey Stokes

Beautiful... a spiritual autobiography that renews the human spirit.... I never want to stop reading this story.  Philadelphia City Paper

Jennifer Hemler

Allison's storytelling shifts into an act of profound healing, a survival tool for mending the heart, sending you back into the world strong, ready, and deeply, deeply loved.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure: 3.7 out of 5based on
0 ratings.
10 reviews.

Bippy1dog

More than 1 year ago

I am horribly upset that I paid $10.99 for 52 page! She is a beautiful writer but 52 pages?

pokylittlepuppy on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

I got this book from the Strand for my first semester of college in 2000. I was supposed to read it during a writing class about memoir. I didn't read it, but I read an additional essay by Dorothy Allison and I liked that, so I always kept the book. In retrospect that was my best class that term. My sister is at the same point in college now, so it seemed fitting to work this one out finally. When I finally opened the book I discovered a receipt for its purchase tucked inside, from a Brentano's in Connecticut in December 1995, along with the ISBN's for Jane Smiley's Duplicate Keys and Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, $50 cash.This book falls squarely into the category of things I avoided because I worried there wasn't time, that turn out to take no time at all. It's so slight, which surprised me the whole time until I got to the last page where the author notes that it was written as a performance piece and modified for publication. The prose is so fluidly voiced, but it seems somewhat unreal that it could be performed aloud. Though, that might explain why the framing device of the title looks a little hokey on the page, which is too bad because most of the rest of it is vivid and warm.Sometimes the lesson of my bookshelf is to stop waiting.

donkeytiara on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

this book made you relive her other novel...because she lived it. pretty frank reading.

Crowyhead on LibraryThing

More than 1 year ago

This slim autobiographical volume packs a lot of punch. With photographs and a storyteller-ish quality, Allison reflects on her impoverished childhood and on the love-hate relationship she long had with the other women in her family. The overall effect is to leave the reader somewhat in awe of the strength that Allison and the other women in her family had in the face of incredible hardship.

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